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QTracks

Music downloads have now become easier than ever with the move of major record labels to sell music in digital format. In Europe, laws which prevented the “ripping” of audio files into digital format has lost ground when it was taken down(which might be a good ideal for it was not enforced anyway). A newcomer into the myriad of P2P download sites is Qtrax is a welcome and refreshing site that boasts to offer 25,000,000 tracks beating iTunes and Amazon . Established only last January 2008, the site has much to prove in terms of service and quality with it’s published capabilities.

The music you get is available only for windows, so sorry for Mac users. The system is based on the ‘Songbird-platform’ which is open-sourced and built into the Mozilla browser, which is also part of the open-sourced projects being used widely today by the millions of PC users all over the globe. There have been tons on glitches but it might be nice to give them a few months to see if they can rough out the download wars where only the best survive. You do get a bit distracted with ads showing as you play music on your PC or digital player, but give these guys a break for they have to earn money somehow.

Oh, and I’d like to add that since the P2P system works on the Mozilla browser, it doesn’t work with iPods(sorry guys). The system is getting quite swamped at the moment with the millions upon millions of users who are trying to get in on the act, which shows that they might have to bolster their back-end systems for them to keep in business. Rumors have circulated that they have signed up with all four major record companies with respect to their offering of music but this was quickly quelled (only one major record company has publicly acknowledged affiliation), by many saying that they haven’t “really” signed up all of them.